Hollywood bowing to China? (part 1)

With rising production costs and a weak national economy, Hollywood is now eying foreign money with even more passion than before. An audience of 1.6 billion people, with a growing middle-class, is enough to put the ￥- signs in any movie producer's eyes. Unfortunately there are some major obstacles in getting your hands on those Chinese yuans. Is Hollywood clever enough to get past them?

Limit on foreign movies
While the US counts more than 59,500 movie theater screens nation wide, China only has little less than 14,000 screens. This means there is a limit to the number of movies which can be shown in the country. Although an average of 9 new screens per day are being added, it will take some time to make movies available to the entire population. Even worse, there is a quota on foreign movies in order to protect the local market. Although this limit has been raised from 20 to 34 foreign films per year, it comes with a catch: the 14 extra films should be either 3D, Imax or animation. This only leaves room for big budget block busters who, to be honest, will need Chinese ticketsales the most to cover their high production costs. Even more reason for for these big budget movies to not step on any censor's toes, since without their approval your movie won't even get near one of those new fancy IMAX screens.

Villains and viruses
A good example is Marvel/Disney's 'Iron Man 3' which was released in spring 2013. It's key villain 'The Mandarin' is originally an English/Chinese scientist and martial artist, with a mad desire to take over the world. But Disney still remembered their run-in with the Chinese censors when releasing 'Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End' where Hong Kong actor Chow Yun-Fat's scenes were mercilessly cut for portraying a Chinese villainous pirate. So this time they dodged the issue by hiring British Ben Kingsley and taking out all references to the Mandarin's Chinese background, knowing very well that 'bad Chinese' in your movie is a no-go for access to that 1.6 billion audience. The question is: will Hollywood ever have a Chinese villain again?

                Ben Kingsley as 'The Mandarin' in 'Iron man 3'

Where Chinese directors know the censors a bit better and can often play an interesting cat and mouse-game, Hollywood only knows the basic rules and prefers to play it safe. Money talks and being a good schoolboy always works. So bad references towards China like the original script of Brad Pitt's World War Z had (a deadly virus originating from China) would be quickly changed (a virus originating from Russia) for the final cut. Even director 'bad-boy' Quentin Tarantino allowed steamy scenes to be cut from 'Django, Unchained', when it was pulled from Chinese theaters for unknown reasons. The new version was allowed to play again but on less screens and suddenly facing competition from the aforementioned 'Iron Man 3'. The momentum was lost and the movie already had a bad rep for being sliced by censors. The young urban crowd was not interested in watching a crippled version while being able to buy a pirated full-version copy for a few yuan. A Chinese box office of only $2.76 million was the poor result.

Co-productions 

Lately Hollywood has found interesting ways to get past that meager quota and get some help with passing the censors: Chinese co-productions. As these are not completely 'foreign' movies they are not included in the quota, and Chinese investors bringing in some extra cash is an interesting bonus. Michael Bay's 'Transformers 4' will be a co-production, in turn needing to add local Chinese actors. Actor/director Keanu Reeves takes it to another level by having a Mandarin/English spoken movie as his directorial debut: 'Man of Tai Chi' featuring the director himself together with local actors Tiger Chen and Karen Mok.

But as all these co-productions add positive Chinese elements to get past censors and pull in that cash, they do seem to ignore an important fact: the audience preferences. The most successful Hollywood movies in China show that the audience couldn't care less about local influences: 'Avatar', 'Transformers: dark of the Moon' and 'Titanic 3D' showed the Chinese audiences something they couldn't find in local movies. Even the success of 'Iron Man 3' can't officially be credited to adding a few extra scenes in the Chinese version. So the question is: would audiences go to see a 'Tai Chi / Kung Fu' movie made by Keanu Reeves while there are more experienced local film makers to handle the material? The joy of American movies is seeing something different and escaping daily life, an American movie partly set in China might take away this experience.